


Little Darkness

by cheshyrekaat



Series: You have seen me, before. [3]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Gen, MIT, Massachusetts, Platonic Cuddling, Random Acts of Violence, before he was Q, smoot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 21:11:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7007017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheshyrekaat/pseuds/cheshyrekaat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Devina and Tristan get to know each other before they entered the world of MI6</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Darkness

It’s almost four o’clock in the morning and if anyone were to see them, they would think they were drunk.

Neither of them had been drinking, but it had always been this way. Devina could drag Tristan along into whatever mischief that she wanted to, and she often did. She was tired of studying for their finals and had finally stolen his books and refused to give them back until he took what turned out to be a much needed break.

She was right. They both already knew the material better than the books did and they were likely dumbing themselves down by studying them so thoroughly.

They were currently on Massachusetts Avenue, laughing like loons, trying to cross the Harvard Bridge in Smoots. It was an impossible task, given that the 5’7” increments were only marked every 10 or so Smoots. Tristan had a feeling that Devina could do it with her eyes closed, she was so much more athletic than he was, but she had been doing her best to drag his body into some sort of shape. 

Tristan stopped, gasping for much needed breath due to the exertion and laughter, sliding down the safety wall and sitting on the ground with his head hanging between his knees. Devina stooped beside him, chuckling at his predicament. He had noticed long ago that she never really relaxed and could see her constantly scanning their surroundings, more noticeable now that they were stationary. He wanted to ask her what she was always looking for and why she was so wary, but as close as they were, she didn’t invite that kind of personal question. She knew absolutely everything about him, and he knew next to nothing about her.

He didn’t know that he was about to get some rather spectacular insight.

}*{

Devina was chuckling as she watched over Tristan while he gained his breath. He was getting much better, but he was still in dismal shape. It seemed he had always focused far more on his mind than his body. She was teaching him that having a fit body did nothing but allow a fit mind to process faster.

She had flourished in the MIT environment, but it wasn’t until she met Tristan that she’d truly learned how to enjoy life for what it had to offer. She felt as though she were making up for lost time. He was truly the light of her life and she’d not let anything happen to him.

But, she’d not keep him from living, either. 

So she dragged him along on whatever hair-brained idea she had. He was learning to have a sense of fun and that life didn’t happen in books. She’d called a halt to his study session in order to make him laugh and remember that he already knew the material; he’d kill himself stressing out if she let him. He was smarter than her and all of their teachers. He just needed to have faith in himself.

She was slowly introducing him to things she had learned from the 00s in her life, about confidence, appearance, how to successfully fake your way through and unfamiliar situation. How to flirt and seduce. Those lessons were harder for him, he took rejection so personally. But, as he gained confidence, he had more success. He had looked to her for a little while, but she had sorted herself and her preferences out just before she’d met him. She had yet to explain it to him, but he seem to accept her as she was, reticent about herself and her past.

She noticed the moment the group of five men stepped onto the bridge and stated walking toward them. Tristan started and looked up at the litany of quiet curses that fell out of her mouth. Damn Mitsuo and his constant tests. She understood, and even appreciated what he was doing, but damn him for risking Tristan.

It occurred to her that this was a test of her depth of feeling for the boy. Mitsuo would see it as defiance, this attachment she had to what he saw as an outsider. He was trying to expose her folly.

Well, Tristan was about to get a crash course in one of the things she was so reticent about. If this really was a mistake, he’d soon be running in the other direction.

She stood, loose limbed and ready, stepping between Tristan and the men he now saw coming their way. She held her hand back, in a stay gesture that of course he didn’t pay attention to as he scrambled to his feet. 

“Devina, let’s go,” he said, urgently.

She looks at him briefly, assessing, before turning back to look at the men coming toward them. 

“Alright,” she said, mildly. She nudged him ahead of her, into a fast clip, not quite a jog. He was still a bit winded, but he was nervous and kept to the pace she gave him.

She could hear that the men were gaining on them and she didn’t trust that they wouldn’t run into more at the end of the bridge. They were in too perfect a position to be flanked by a small group. They really had nowhere to go, the distance from the bridge to the river too much to risk unnecessarily.

She asked, anyway.

}*{

“Tristan, you can swim, right?”

Tristan looked at her like she was crazy. Maybe she was. 

“Yes, but not well,” he responded, expression showing that he didn’t understand why she was asking now, of all times.

“Shit,” she said, with feeling, “there goes that idea.” 

Tristan trotted along, not liking the train of thought that comment led him down. Surely she wasn’t thinking about going over the bridge, he thought just before he noticed two more men coming toward them from the opposite end.

“Devina,” he said, voice strained, “incoming.”

There was an explosion of expletives from behind him, and they didn’t come from Devina. He turned to look and he saw that Devina was still keeping pace with him, but she was now walking backward and three of the five men were no longer standing. She turned back toward him and assessed the men coming from that direction.

“Tristan, I need you to get down, close to the wall and cover your head with your arms,” Devina said, sharp and commanding as she grabbed his arm and pulled him the direction that she wanted him to go. 

He once again slid down the safety wall, this time curling himself as small as his lanky frame would allow. His movement to cover his head was aborted when he caught a glimpse of Devina drawing a pair of long knives. She drew one from between her shoulders at the back of her neck and the other from below her knee. _Well, now I know why she doesn’t buy of the rack_ , he thought, a little hysterically.

“Tristan,” she said, voice devoid of emotion, “I said to cover your head,” she reminds him as she backs up so that she is in front of him and there are two men to either side of her. 

He wonders why no one has called the police before he remembers that it’s not quite 4 am and the streets are still dark an empty. He still doesn’t cover his head, in fact, he is calming down and starting to wonder why he is sitting on the ground while she stands off against four men.

He scans the men and gulps as he realizes that they are all bigger than Devina. And they are armed. But, he had forgotten that she was, as well.

Devina was no longer standing in front of him, she had gone for the two men left of the five, back the way they had come. She seemed to blur as she move and when he could focus again, he was glad it was dark because she had dark splashes across her arms and the two men were down, without a sound.

His head whipped around the other way as he heard a footstep entirely too close to him. He was unceremoniously hauled upward by his arm and he let out and undignified squawk as he was pulled in front of one man and held by an arm around his throat and the second man stopped a couple steps in front of him to face Devina as she turned back around.

“Sukoshi Yami,” the man in front of him said to her, “did we find your weakness?”

Tristan bristled at the implication that he made Devina weak and it spurred him into anger as he saw her smile like a shark at the man speaking to her. 

“You did not,” she said, still void of emotion as she sheathed one of her knives. “He is my strength.” 

At that, Tristan brought his fist down and slammed it into his captor’s groin. He fell to the ground, off balance as the man doubled over and let go of him abruptly. He scrambled back to the safely wall and worked his way to his feet and looked back at Devina. She was calmly walking back to where the first three men had fallen. He began to hyperventilate as he saw that last two men were down. The man who’d been holding him had a spike sticking out of his head and the one who’d been speaking to Devina was on his back, gasping wetly with two of the same spikes sticking out of his chest.

}*{

Devina broke in to a jog, a litany of _fuck fuck fuck fuck_ running through her head.

She knew that she had to get her things and get Tristan out of here before he succumbed to the shock he was on the edge of. There was no way she was going to be able to do anything about that bodies, but it was possible that her Shihan would. 

She had begun to doubt that he’d set these particular men on her. The people that he set on her had never tried to so boldly confront her, they were generally smarter than that. These men had also used her nickname in the Asian community. This might have been a play for personal glory. If this was how they had thought to do it, they were too stupid to be allowed to run free, anyway.

She stopped at each body, collected her weapons and put them away. She made sure nothing of her was left behind, not handling the bodies, at all. As she stopped at the last man, the one with two spikes sticking out of his chest and gurgling his last breaths full of blood, she felt a satisfaction that she hadn’t over a killing in a long time.   
The man was looking up at her with panic in his eyes. She crouched down next to him and bent over to whisper in his ear.

“I protect what’s mine,” she said to him and raised up to look in his eyes as she pulled her throwing spikes out of his chest and put them away. She didn’t give the man any other notice as she made her way back to a very pale and hyperventilating Tristan.

She wiped her hands on her pants before she reached out to his face and turned his face toward her, away from the death around them.

“Tristan. Tristan, look at me.” 

He slowly rolled his eyes to meet hers.

“You have to walk, Tris, we have to get out of here,” she told him, straightening them both up and pulling his arm around her shoulder.

He stumbled for a few steps before gaining his footing and he started to match his breathing to hers. She withheld a sigh of relief that he was able to get himself moving. She could carry him back to his dorm, but it would have been a whole lot more difficult. This way, she just looked like she was helping her drunk friend home.

Thankfully, his dorm was in Maseeh Hall, right off of Massachusetts Avenue. They were in the courtyard before she heard the sirens coming to a halt where they had been. She guessed that Mitsuo hadn’t dealt with the bodies, after all. Another lesson for her. 

Thankfully, she knew that MI6 constantly made sure that their operative’s fingerprints were never on file anywhere for long. She’d put that program in place, herself. It hadn’t made sense to her that they might be tied to multiple crime scenes that way; heaven forbid they ever get arrested. No one needed that mess, so she had a program that took care of that potential problem for them. She made sure to update it periodically.

By the time she got Tristan up to his room, he was breathing shallowly and swaying on his feet, shivering. She propped him up on the wall and dug his key out and got him in the room and onto his bed. She stripped him of his clothing and shoved him under the covers. She grabbed his laptop and sat next to where he curled himself up facing the wall on the bed. 

She sighed as she looked at him, wondering if he’d still want her in his life after what he just seen her do. It was a first. No one else had ever seen it, other than her Shihan. Even her grandmother only had knowledge of it, not first-hand experience. She shook off the gloom and got to work, making sure that there were no cameras in the area that had caught their late night jaunt and the resulting slaughter.

When she was done, she closed the laptop and scrubbed her hands over her face and hair. When she stopped and looked, there was flakes of dried blood on her hands. She wiped them off on her pants again, and set the laptop aside before checking on Tristan. He’d fallen into a fitful sleep, so she kissed him on the forehead before she got up and shucked her pants and waistcoat, leaving them in a pile beside the be before she began to unstrap her weaponry. 

She was thankful that her sheaths were all synthetic, since she hadn’t an opportunity to clean her weapons before putting them away. She’d have to carefully clean everything and blood was a disaster to natural fibers. She rolled everything but one knife up and set the bundle at the end of Tristan’s bed before taking herself and her knife to the bathroom to use his shower.

}*{

When Tristan woke, he was momentarily disoriented, confused by the warmth that was pressed along his back, curling along the backs of his legs where he had them pulled up. He took a moment to register the weight around his waist and hanging over his abdomen was an arm. 

_What the hell did we get up to last night?_

He didn’t remember them going out, so he didn’t remember brining anyone home. He tried to turn over without too much disturbance to see if he recognized the body behind him.

To say he was startled to find Devina looking right into his eyes would be a gross understatement.

“Good morning, Shin’yu,” she said, smiling at him.

He closed his eyes and shuddered as the evening came flooding back to him. He felt her hands on his face and he opened his eyes again.

“Are you alright?” he asked her, his own hands reaching out to connect with her skin.

“I am,” she said, running her fingers through his hair. “But now that you are awake, I have a few things that I need to check on.” She continued to stroke the hair back from his face. “And you should shower.”

He blinked at her for a moment before bursting into laughter and asked her, incredulous, “Are you saying that I stink? After all that, that is what you are concerned with?” 

She hums at him, appreciatively. “Yes, you stink. You were in shock, and the smell of cold sweat is not appealing. You usually smell much better.”

“I-what? I smell good?” he asked her, baffled by what she was choosing to talk about.

“Yes,” she said before she kissed his forehead and rolled out of bed. 

He watched her blurry form rummage through his chest of drawers in her bra and panties, completely floored by what was happening in his life. She pulled out a pair of track pants and a t-shirt and pulled them on. She then grabbed a bag and stuffed what looked like her dirty clothes and a bundle of straps and metal in to it. She zipped it closed and set it by the door before coming back to sit on the bed facing him.

“Still with me, yujin?” she asked him.

He pushed himself up so that he was sitting leaned against the wall and reached out, grabbing his glasses off the night stand and putting them on.

“You mean after last night?” he asked her.

She nodded at him and just sat, watching him.

He thought about it. Really thought about it. Was he ok that he’d watched his best friend that he didn’t know anything about kill seven people last night? He blew out a breath as he decided that he was. He’d never felt threatened by her in anyway, and she took care of him better than anyone else ever had. However, he refused to be in the dark any longer about her or her life. She was a killer; what could be worse than that?

“Yeah,” he said to her, meeting her eyes again. “I’m still with you.” 

She smiled at him brilliantly.

“But if you think that I don’t get to know about you after this, you are wrong. I think I deserve to know it all,” he told her, voice stern.

His breath whumped out of him as she sprang at him and pulled him into a tight hug.

“Yes,” she said, “yes. I’ll tell you everything.” She leaned back from him and gave him a considering look. “But I still need to go take care of somethings, and you need to shower and get some more sleep. Or play video games or something. No studying!” she told him, getting off the bed and gathering her things. “I should be back in the morning.”

“Alright, alright,” he said, exasperated, “I’ll shower and rest. Get out of here, come back when you are done, even if it is before morning.”

She grinned at him again before turning and heading out the door. He heard it lock behind her.

He slumped back down on the bed and groaned as he got a whiff of himself. She was right, he admitted as he crawled out of bed, he did stink.

He met Mitsuo later that night.

**Author's Note:**

> Google translate is my friend! And, I know the words aren't accented right, so forgive me while I try to figure that out.  
> Sukoshi Yami-Little Darkness  
> yujin-friend  
> shin'yu-best friend
> 
> Feedback is welcome and encouraged


End file.
